Two sources have inspired me this post: 1- my friendship with a retired American cleric and a discussion that is going on in Respect Discussion group :
http://groups.msn.com/Respectpoliticalparty
My American friend is somebody who has frequently made me think on the true task religion has in the lives of people. How people can even kill for their faith and how faith has many times been used by interested people with ends different to what the real motivation of faith must be. He is somebody I look up to for inspiration. A true pater familias with his dear wife and grown-up children who in all make up one of the really typical American families. But he is a human cleric. I always tell him he is a man of God and I feel from thousands of kilometres away that he blushes because his modesty does prevent him from being overly proud. Bob must be reading this post because he is a friend’s friend and always worried how we are doing in life, although I for one sometimes forget that he is one I should always be attentive to.
Going back to that discussion in Respect (link above) two friends of mine, one Christian the other Muslim, are discussing aspects of each one’s religion and their respective beliefs.
In my opinion a religion is not debatable. A religion is a compendium of all the various steps men have gathered to form the essence of that faith, but the faith in itself cannot be explained. Either you believe or you do not believe. Faith is something inherent to each individual and each individual in each religion believes in a way that is not precisely the same way the person next to him on the same pew of the same church believes. The human mind is so complicated that the only explanation I can find to design it is that it must have been created by a supreme being that we all have coincided along the years to call God. Scientist in the XXI century who have been able with their brains to devise tools that take man to the outer space and even different planets, have not been yet capable of describing how really their brains work .
How can we in our infinitesimal presence in the universe can pretend that we know God, much less how can we pretend that God is existing in our image, someone resembling us?.
We are nothing but a heap of bones, flesh, veins, blood and waste that in a given number of years will be inexistent, because Nature so determines following, I infer, the instructions given by God in His wisdom.
But I do not know it, I just believe it.
Jose+++
Posted in Religion
Must be bedtime.